Table of Contents

Our Disputed Election

The Unz Review • January 14, 2021 • 2,000 Words
The Limits of Media Corruption
The Unz Review • May 22, 2023 • 3,400 Words
Donald Trump, Eugene Debs, and AMLO
The Unz Review • August 7, 2023 • 4,900 Words
The Attempted Assassination of Donald Trump
The Unz Review • July 17, 2024 • 2,000 Words
Our Disputed Election
The Unz Review • January 14, 2021 • 2,000 Words

Although hardly suggested by our mainstream media, the officially-reported

results demonstrated that our 2020 presidential election was extraordinarily
close.

All the regular pre-election polls had shown the Democratic candidate with a
comfortable lead, but just as had been the case four years earlier, the actual
votes tabulated revealed an entirely contrary outcome. According to the
official vote-count, the Biden/Harris ticket ended up millions of votes ahead,
having racked up huge leads in overwhelmingly Democratic states such as
my own California, and also won by a very comfortable 306 to 232 margin
in Electoral Votes. But control of the White House depends upon the state-
by-state tallies, and these told a very different story.

Incumbent Donald Trump lost Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin by such

extremely narrow margins that a swing of less than 22,000 votes in those
crucial states would have gotten him reelected. With a record 158 million
votes cast, this amounted to a victory margin of around 0.01%. So if just
one American voter in 7,000 had changed his mind, Trump might have
received another four years in office. One American voter in 7,000.

Such an exceptionally narrow victory is extremely unusual in modern

American history. For decades, the very tight Kennedy-Nixon race of 1960
had been a byword for close results, but Biden’s margin of victory was much
smaller. More recently, George W. Bush won a narrow reelection over Sen.
John F. Kerry in 2004, but Kerry would have required a voter swing nearly
five times greater than Trump’s in order to claim victory. Indeed, with the
sole exception of the notorious “dangling chads” Florida decision of the
2000 Bush-Gore election, no American presidential candidate in over 100
years had lost by so narrow a voter margin as Donald J. Trump.

If our incompetent or dishonest media had correctly reported these simple

facts, perhaps Democratic partisans would have been somewhat more
understanding of the outrage expressed by so many of their Republican
counterparts, who believed they had been cheated of their election victory.
Admittedly, Trump backers seem equally unaware of the historically slender
margin of their candidate’s defeat.

The emotions on both sides of the Trump reelection campaign were among
the strongest in modern American history, and the outcome was determined
by the tiniest sliver of voters in a few states. So under these circumstances,
last week’s controversial events in DC were perhaps not so entirely
unexpected. Indeed, during the weeks before the election, I’d half-predicted
such a scenario, speculating about possible claims of a stolen election and
the resulting civil unrest. For example, the following was my response to a
question from a longtime commenter:

Many Trump supporters are alleging that there could be massive

voting fraud in the 2020 election. Some believe that if Trump is
ahead on election night, Democratic machines will manufacture
ballots to give a victory to Biden. Do you think this is possible or
do you see this as improbable?

Well, I suppose it’s possible …

Frankly, both sides are so totally agitated and extreme, the Trumpists
would be saying and believing it, even if it were entirely false and
impossible. It’s hard to figure out what’s happening when everyone
involved is so dishonest and corrupt. Trump has always seemed like an
ignorant buffoon to me, but I think the Democrats and liberals have
almost gone insane in their opposition to him.

As I’ve been telling people for weeks, the whole political situation
certainly seems very bizarre and I’ve seen some pretty plausible
arguments that we might end up with a “disputed” election if the
numbers are fairly close in key states. Apparently, the Republicans are
overwhelmingly going to be voting in person, while the Democrats will
be voting by mail, meaning their ballots will be much slower to come in
and be counted.
 So Trump could be ahead by wide margins on Election Night and
declare victory to the cheers of his partisans. And then as the mail
ballots come in, the numbers turn against him, but he and his die-hard
supporters cry “Fraud!” and refuse to recognize the result. Hard to say
what would happen, but I’m glad I live in California which is generally
quiet and peaceful these days.

Obviously, Bush/Gore was “disputed” in 2000, but only party loyalists

much cared at the time, while today the country is filled with Trumpists
and Trump-haters, both very suspicious and angry.

Although I think my speculative scenario turned out to be reasonably

correct, the actual post-election developments were far greater in magnitude
than I had expected, and may have dire consequences for maintaining
American civil liberties.

I haven’t investigated the matter, but there does seem to be considerable

circumstantial evidence of widespread ballot fraud by Democratic Party
forces, hardly surprising given the apocalyptic manner in which so many of
their leaders had characterized the threat of a Trump reelection. After all, if
they sincerely believed that a Trump victory would be catastrophic for
America why would they not use every possible means, fair and foul alike,
to save our country from that dire fate?

In particular, several of the major swing-states contain large cities—Detroit,

Milwaukee, Philadelphia, and Atlanta—that are both totally controlled by
the Democratic Party and also notoriously corrupt, and various eye-
witnesses have suggested that the huge anti-Trump margins they provided
may have been heavily “padded” to ensure the candidate’s defeat.

Even leaving aside some of these plausible claims, the case for a stolen
election seems almost airtight. I don’t know or care anything about
Dominion voting machines, whether they are controlled by Venezuelan
Marxists, Chinese Communists, or Martians. But the most blatant election-
theft was accomplished in absolutely plain sight.
Not long before the election, the hard drive of an abandoned laptop owned
by Joe Biden’s son Hunter revealed a gigantic international corruption
scheme, quite possibility involving the candidate himself. But the facts of
this enormous political scandal were entirely ignored and boycotted by
virtually every mainstream media outlet. And once the story was finally
published in the pages of the New York Post, America’s oldest newspaper, all
links to the Post article and its website were suddenly banned by Twitter,
Facebook, and other social media outlets to ensure that the voters remained
ignorant until after they had cast their ballots.

Renowned international journalist Glenn Greenwald was hardly a Trump

partisan, but he became outraged that the editors of the Intercept, the \$100
million publication he himself had co-founded, refused to allow him to cover
that massive media scandal, and he angrily resigned in protest. In effect,
America’s media and tech giants formed a united front to steal the election
and somehow drag the crippled Biden/Harris ticket across the finish line.

The Hunter Biden corruption scandal seemed about as serious as any in

modern presidential election history and Biden’s official victory margin was
just 0.01%. So if the American voters had been allowed to learn the truth,
Trump almost certainly would have won the election, quite possibly in an
Electoral College landslide. Given these facts, anyone who continues to
deny that the election was stolen from Trump is simply being ridiculous.

Heated election campaigns have consequences, and this is especially true

when all of America’s most powerful corporations and ruling elites unite to
essentially steal a reelection from a populist incumbent, hero-worshiped by
many tens of millions of Americans. And when despite all that blatant
unfairness and theft, the final margin of defeat is just one vote in 7,000, an
explosion of popular outrage should only be expected.

Solid estimates appear unavailable, but it seems that hundreds of thousands

of grass-roots Trump supporters traveled to our nation’s capital to protest
against what they regarded as a stolen election, and then peacefully
assembled to listen to their hero’s speech.
Afterwards, a tiny sliver of this vast multitude of angry individuals—perhaps
less than one in a thousand—barged their way into the strangely-undefended
Capitol building of Congress, took souvenir selfies, livesteamed their antics,
and generally played the role of tourist-protesters while the lawmakers they
so despised as corrupt mostly fled or hid. These Trumpists and some of their
colorful costumes brought to mind the radical Yippies of the late 1960s.
The previous year had seen an unprecedented wave of violent riots, arson,
and looting across some 200 American cities, which our entirely corrupt and
dishonest media had generally characterized as “mostly peaceful protests.”
In previous years, angry mobs of organized Democratic activists had
repeatedly invaded and occupied the Wisconsin Legislature, sometimes
winning praise from the media. But when unarmed Trump supporters now
did something similar for a few hours in Washington, they were quickly
branded “domestic terrorists” seeking to overthrow our democracy.

A video shows Ashli Babbitt, an unarmed female protester, being shot dead
by a security guard as she tried to climb through a window, an incident not
dissimilar to the famous Kent State shootings of a 1960s campus protest, but
hardly treated by the media in a similar manner.
A couple of other Trump protesters, probably elderly, overweight, or in poor
health, died of strokes or heart-attacks during all the excitement, and one
Capitol police officer later died as well, allegedly struck in the head with a
fire-extinguisher although there has been no solid account of the incident.
Yet this confused tableau of chaos and popular anger, which recalls scenes
from the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention protests, has been portrayed
as a “coup attempt” incited by President Trump, and therefore justifying his
second impeachment.

Even more importantly, the incoming Biden/Harris Administration may be

considering the most sweeping domestic crackdown upon traditional
American civil liberties since the Patriot Act was passed in the hurried
aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks twenty years ago. This has been
justified by the need to suppress “domestic extremism.”

Even without any new governmental legislation, a remarkable Internet

crackdown has already begun. In an absolutely unprecedented development,
the sitting president of the United States—who had just lost his reelection by
0.01% of the vote—has been summarily banned by Twitter, Facebook, and
all other major social media outlets, preventing him from communicating
with his followers, and with many of his leading supporters suffering the
same fate. Famed libertarian Ron Paul criticized Twitter for banning Trump,
and he was immediately locked out of his own Facebook page. Parler, a
young but rapidly growing Twitter competitor, refused to ban Trump, and
was immediately driven off the Internet by a combined attack from Apple,
Google, and Amazon, possibly never to return. Our Information Age has
entered a truly Orwellian period.

These Tech giants have often justified their extreme censorship by

expressing the need to combat the spread of the dangerous “conspiracy
theories” so widespread among Trump partisans. Particularly demonized by
the media is the wildly popular “QAnon” theory, which numbered the
unfortunate Ms. Babbitt among its committed followers. Although I’m only
very slightly familiar with QAnon, it appears to be a bizarre mishmash of
many strange ideas, notably including the belief that our ruling elites heavily
consist of exceptionally corrupt and criminal individuals, sometimes even
being Satanic pedophiles.

Although much of that doctrine seems like total nonsense to me, we should
note the massive suppression this movement has experienced and bear in
mind that “the wicked flee when no man pursueth.” And indeed, my own
articles over the years have solidly established that many of the seemingly
ridiculous elements of QAnon probably contain a very large nugget of truth:

American Pravda: John McCain, Jeffrey Epstein, and Pizzagate

John McCain: When “Tokyo Rose” Ran for President
Our American Pravda
American Pravda: How the CIA Invented “Conspiracy Theories
The Limits of Media Corruption
The Unz Review • May 22, 2023 • 3,400 Words

I published my original American Pravda article just over ten years ago,
emphasizing that our reality was created by the media, which many of us
eventually discovered was far from reliable.

Aside from the evidence of our own senses, almost everything we

know about the past or the news of today comes from bits of ink on
paper or colored pixels on a screen, and fortunately over the last
decade or two the growth of the Internet has vastly widened the range
of information available to us in that latter category. Even if the
overwhelming majority of the unorthodox claims provided by such
non-traditional web-based sources is incorrect, at least there now exists
the possibility of extracting vital nuggets of truth from vast mountains
of falsehood. Certainly the events of the past dozen years have forced
me to completely recalibrate my own reality-detection apparatus.

Our American Pravda

Ron Unz • The American Conservative • April 29, 2013 • 4,500
Words

Then five years ago this month I launched that series in earnest, eventually
producing many dozens of articles that have totaled a half million words.

Although I’ve tried to be extremely careful in all this historical and media
analysis, the surprising conclusions I’ve reached on so many past events
have sometimes raised doubts in the back of my mind. Even if the evidence
seems compelling and the sources quite credible, I wonder if it might really
be possible for such explosive facts to be completely ignored by nearly all
our media outlets. Surely the prospects of professional prizes would have
tempted at least a few respectable journalists or academics into jumping on
those same clues, setting off a cascade of their colleagues and resulting in a
flood of media coverage. It seems almost inconceivable that nearly
everyone could be ignoring such important matters.
But every now and then another example appears that confirms the reality
of such seemingly implausible media silence.

Consider the case of Jonathan Turley, a leading establishmentarian figure

who holds the Shapiro Chair of Public Interest Law at George Washington
University. As his 5,000 word Wikipedia entry describes, he has spent
decades as one of our most prolific and influential media commentators on
legal matters, publishing numerous pieces in the New York Times and the
Washington Post while being a regular guest on our broadcast networks.
His long career has been entirely mainstream, and there is no sign he has
ever explored any of the controversial topics that are the focus of my own
research.

But just last week he published an outraged column in The Hill—a very
respectable DC outlet—expressing his amazement at the total unwillingness
of our media to report the massive evidence of financial corruption
engulfing the family of President Joe Biden. His stunned reaction was so
forceful that his remarks are worth excerpting at considerable length:

This week, Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) tried to do the impossible.

After he and his colleagues presented a labyrinth of LLC shell
companies and accounts used to funnel as much as $10 million to
Biden family members, Donalds tried to induce the press to show
some interest in the massive corruption scandal. “For those in the
press, this easy pickings & Pulitzer-level stuff right here,” he pleaded.

The response was virtually immediate. Despite showing nine Biden

family members allegedly receiving funds from corrupt figures in
Romania, China and other countries, The New Republic quickly ran a
story headlined “Republicans Finally Admit They Have No
Incriminating Evidence on Joe Biden.”

For many of us, it was otherworldly. A decade ago, when then-Vice

President Joe Biden was denouncing corruption in Romania and
Ukraine and promising action by the United States, massive payments
were flowing to his son Hunter Biden and a variety of family
members, including Biden grandchildren.
The brilliance of the Biden team was that it invested the media in this
scandal at the outset by burying the laptop story as “Russian
disinformation” before the election. That was, of course, false, but it
took two years for most major media outlets to admit that the laptop
was authentic.

But the media then ignored what was on that “authentic laptop.”
Hundreds of emails detailed potentially criminal conduct and raw
influence peddling in foreign countries.

When media outlets such as the New York Post confirmed the emails,
the media then insisted that there was no corroboration of the influence
peddling payments and no clear proof of criminal conduct. It entirely
ignored the obvious corruption itself.

Now that the House has released corroboration in actual money

transfers linking many in the Biden family, the media is insisting that
this is no scandal because there is no direct proof of payments to Joe
Biden.

Putting aside that this is only the fourth month of an investigation, the
media’s demand of a direct payment to President Biden is laughably
absurd. The payments were going to his family, but he was the object
of the influence peddling.

The House has shown millions of dollars going to at least nine

Bidens like dividends from a family business. As a long-time critic of
influence peddling among both Republicans and Democrats, I have
never seen the equal of the Bidens.

The whole purpose of influence peddling is to use family members as

shields for corrupt officials. Instead of making a direct payment to a
politician, which could be seen as a bribe, you can give millions to his
or her spouse or children.

Moreover, these emails include references to Joe Biden getting a 10

percent cut of one Chinese deal. It also shows Biden associates
warning not to use Joe Biden’s name but to employ code names like
“the Big Guy.” At the same time, the president and the first lady are
referenced as benefiting from offices and receiving payments from
Hunter.

Indeed, Hunter complains that his father is taking half of everything

that he is raking in.

None of that matters. The New York Times ran a piece headlined,
“House Republican Report Finds No Evidence of Wrongdoing by
President Biden.” That is putting aside evidence against all the family
members around Joe Biden. It also ignored that other evidence clearly
shows Biden lied about his family not receiving Chinese funds or
that he never had any knowledge of his son’s business dealings.

In discussing modern Russian propaganda, researchers at the Rand

Corporation described it as having “two distinctive features: high
numbers of channels and messages and a shameless willingness to
disseminate partial truths or outright fictions.”

Sound familiar?

Today we are seeing a much more dangerous phenomenon. The

coverage this week has all the markings of a state media. The
consistent spin. The almost universal lack of details. The absurd
distinctions.

It is the blindside of our First Amendment, which addresses the classic

use of state authority to coerce and control media. It does not address a
circumstance in which most of the media will maintain an official line
by consent rather than coercion.

The media simply fails to see the story. Of course, it can always look
to the president for enlightenment. Just before his son received a
massive transfer of money from one of the most corrupt figures in
Romania, Biden explained to that country why corruption must remain
everyone’s focus. “Corruption is a cancer, a cancer that eats away at a
citizen’s faith in democracy,” he said. “Corruption is just another form
of tyranny.”
 It is just a shame that no one wants to cover it.

America’s state media: The blackout on Biden corruption is truly

‘Pulitzer-level stuff’
Jonathan Turley • The Hill • May 13, 2023 • 1,000 Words

If our journalists are unwilling to report the most blatant evidence of

corruption surrounding our President, is there any chance they would be
willing to consider the far more controversial topics I have covered in my
series? And prior to the existence of the Internet, how many individuals
would have even become aware of these facts or Turley’s accusations?

His bitter complaints brought to mind one of my early American Pravda

pieces, in which I’d described similar claims made by prominent journalist
John T. Flynn in the 1940s. He had been outraged by the unwillingness of
the media to report the enormous familial corruption surrounding President
Franklin D. Roosevelt, involving sums vastly larger than those received by
the Biden family.

Take the case of John T. Flynn, probably unknown today to all but
one American in a hundred, if even that…

So imagine my surprise at discovering that throughout the 1930s he

had been one of the single most influential liberal voices in American
society, a writer on economics and politics whose status may have
roughly approximated that of Paul Krugman, though with a strong
muck-raking tinge. His weekly column in The New Republic allowed
him to serve as a lodestar for America’s progressive elites, while his
regular appearances in Colliers, an illustrated mass circulation weekly
reaching many millions of Americans, provided him a platform
comparable to that of an major television personality in the later
heyday of network TV.

To some extent, Flynn’s prominence may be objectively quantified. A

few years ago, I happened to mention his name to a well-read and
committed liberal born in the 1930s, and she unsurprisingly drew a
complete blank, but wondered if he might have been a little
like Walter Lippmann, the very famous columnist of that era. When I
checked, I saw that across the hundreds of periodicals in my archiving
system, there were just 23 articles by Lippmann from the 1930s but
fully 489 by Flynn.

But Flynn’s claims were extremely precise, detailed, and specific,

including numerous names, dates, and references. Most surprisingly,
he accused the Roosevelts of exhibiting an extraordinary degree of
familial financial corruption, which he claimed may have been
unprecedented in American history. Apparently, despite his wealthy
and elite background FDR’s eldest son Elliott never attended college
and had essentially no professional qualifications in anything. But
soon after FDR became president, he began soliciting large personal
payments and “investments” from wealthy businessmen who needed
favors from the massively growing federal government, and seemingly
did so with FDR’s full knowledge and approval. The situation sounded
a little like Billy Carter’s notorious activities during the late 1970s, but
the money involved totaled as much as $50 million in present-day
dollars relative to the household income of that era. I had never heard a
word about this.

Even more shocking was the case of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt,
who also had never attended college and apparently had little formal
education of any sort. Soon after FDR was inaugurated, she began a
major round of very well-paid personal advertising for corporate
consumer products such as soap and took all sorts of other large
payments over the next few years from various businesses, especially
those crucially dependent upon government regulatory decisions.
Imagine if recent First Ladies such as Michelle Obama or Laura Bush
were constantly seen in TV ads hawking cars and diapers and fast
food. The payments Eleanor personally received over the course of the
FDR’s dozen years in office allegedly came to an astonishing $150
million, again relative to current family incomes. This, too, was
something that I had never suspected. And all this was occurring
during the very depths of the Great Depression, when a huge fraction
of the country was desperately poor. Perhaps Juan and Eva Peron just
didn’t hire the right PR people or simply aimed too low.
 Obviously, the unprecedented growth in the spending and regulatory
power of the federal government during the New Deal years increased
opportunities for this sort of personal graft by an enormous amount.
But Flynn notes how odd the situation seemed since FDR’s inherited
fortune meant that he had already come into office as one of the
wealthiest presidents of modern times. And as far as I’ve heard, his
successor Harry S. Truman left the White House about as poor as he
had entered it.

American Pravda: Our Great Purge of the 1940s

Ron Unz • The Unz Review • June 11, 2018 • 5,500 Words

According to Flynn, FDR’s political victories were partly enabled by the

total unwillingness of the partisan media of the day to report the facts of his
personal corruption, and Prof. Turley says the same regarding Biden’s 2020
victory over Donald Trump.

Days after the January 6th storming of the Capitol by outraged Trumpists, I
had made a similar point, arguing that Trump’s partisans had severely
undercut their own case by focusing upon very dubious claims of Dominion
voting machine fraud instead of the much more important factors of
massive media bias and censorship.

I haven’t investigated the matter, but there does seem to be

considerable circumstantial evidence of widespread ballot fraud by
Democratic Party forces, hardly surprising given the apocalyptic
manner in which so many of their leaders had characterized the threat
of a Trump reelection. After all, if they sincerely believed that a Trump
victory would be catastrophic for America why would they not use
every possible means, fair and foul alike, to save our country from that
dire fate?

In particular, several of the major swing-states contain large cities—

Detroit, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, and Atlanta—that are both totally
controlled by the Democratic Party and also notoriously corrupt, and
various eye-witnesses have suggested that the huge anti-Trump
 margins they provided may have been heavily “padded” to ensure the
candidate’s defeat.

Even leaving aside some of these plausible claims, the case for a stolen
election seems almost airtight. I don’t know or care anything about
Dominion voting machines, whether they are controlled by Venezuelan
Marxists, Chinese Communists, or Martians. But the most blatant
election-theft was accomplished in absolutely plain sight.

Not long before the election, the hard drive of an abandoned laptop
owned by Joe Biden’s son Hunter revealed a gigantic international
corruption scheme, quite possibility involving the candidate himself.
But the facts of this enormous political scandal were entirely ignored
and boycotted by virtually every mainstream media outlet. And once
the story was finally published in the pages of the New York Post,
America’s oldest newspaper, all links to the Post article and its website
were suddenly banned by Twitter, Facebook, and other social media
outlets to ensure that the voters remained ignorant until after they had
cast their ballots.

Renowned international journalist Glenn Greenwald was hardly a

Trump partisan, but he became outraged that the editors of
the Intercept, the $100 million publication he himself had co-founded,
refused to allow him to cover that massive media scandal, and he
angrily resigned in protest. In effect, America’s media and tech
giants formed a united front to steal the election and somehow drag the
crippled Biden/Harris ticket across the finish line.

Furthermore, as former longtime CIA Analyst Ray McGovern noted it has

now come out that current Secretary of State Antony Blinken but then a top
Biden aide had helped orchestrate the public declaration by 51 former
Intelligence officers that the contents of the Hunter Biden laptop should be
disregarded as likely Russian disinformation.
I had also pointed out that Trump’s incompetent advocates had failed to
emphasize the exceptionally close nature of the 2020 vote, which helped
explain why his outraged supporters were driven to public protests:

Although hardly suggested by our mainstream media, the officially-

reported results demonstrated that our 2020 presidential election was
extraordinarily close.

All the regular pre-election polls had shown the Democratic candidate
with a comfortable lead, but just as had been the case four years
earlier, the actual votes tabulated revealed an entirely contrary
outcome. According to the official vote-count, the Biden/Harris ticket
ended up millions of votes ahead, having racked up huge leads in
overwhelmingly Democratic states such as my own California, and
also won by a very comfortable 306 to 232 margin in Electoral Votes.
But control of the White House depends upon the state-by-state tallies,
and these told a very different story.

Incumbent Donald Trump lost Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin by

such extremely narrow margins that a swing of less than 22,000 votes
in those crucial states would have gotten him reelected. With a record
 158 million votes cast, this amounted to a victory margin of around
0.01%. So if just one American voter in 7,000 had changed his mind,
Trump might have received another four years in office. One
American voter in 7,000.

Such an exceptionally narrow victory is extremely unusual in modern

American history. For decades, the very tight Kennedy-Nixon race of
1960 had been a byword for close results, but Biden’s margin of
victory was much smaller. More recently, George W. Bush won a
narrow reelection over Sen. John F. Kerry in 2004, but Kerry would
have required a voter swing nearly five times greater than Trump’s in
order to claim victory. Indeed, with the sole exception of the notorious
“dangling chads” Florida decision of the 2000 Bush-Gore election, no
American presidential candidate in over 100 years had lost by so
narrow a voter margin as Donald J. Trump.

If our incompetent or dishonest media had correctly reported these

simple facts, perhaps Democratic partisans would have been somewhat
more understanding of the outrage expressed by so many of their
Republican counterparts, who believed they had been cheated of their
election victory. Admittedly, Trump backers seem equally unaware of
the historically slender margin of their candidate’s defeat.

The Hunter Biden corruption scandal seemed about as serious as any

in modern presidential election history and Biden’s official victory
margin was just 0.01%. So if the American voters had been allowed to
learn the truth, Trump almost certainly would have won the election,
quite possibly in an Electoral College landslide. Given these facts,
anyone who continues to deny that the election was stolen from Trump
is simply being ridiculous.

American Pravda: Our Disputed Election

Ron Unz • The Unz Review • January 14, 2021 • 2,000 Words

The total protection extended to Biden and his family despite the
overwhelming evidence of criminality is matched by the huge efforts to
railroad Trump on very doubtful grounds.

Columnist Kevin Barrett is a Muslim convert friendly towards Iran and he

has long detested Trump, whom he considers an “odious” figure. Yet the
totally unhinged campaign of vilification against the former President by
our entire political and media establishment had led him to consider
supporting Trump in the 2024 election:

Jimmy Dore makes a good case that Trump’s civil trial for sexual
assault and defamation was “A Pure Democratic Hit Job.” Dore
points out that New York’s bizarre one-year repeal of the statute of
limitations was specifically designed to grease the skids for Carroll-v-
Trump. Since when did governments start temporarily repealing
statutes of limitations so they can go after political figures they don’t
like? The move seems especially egregious because it involved an
almost three-decade-old case in which the alleged victim can’t even
remember which year the alleged assault happened, and has no
evidence whatsoever other than her word against his. If you’re going
to do something as extreme as suspending the statute of limitations so
you can prosecute a specific case, shouldn’t you at least have some
evidence?

Why I’m ALMOST Ready to Vote for Trump

Even if he runs from Death Row
Kevin Barrett • The Unz Review • May 14, 2023 • 800 Words

Progressive journalists such as Max Blumenthal and Aaron Mate have

similarly ridiculed Trump’s concurrent indictment on hush-money charges
by an NYC prosecutor.
Thoughtful individuals naturally extrapolate from matters that they fully
understand to those less familiar to them. If Prof. Turley and other
respectable figures have now concluded that our mainstream media is far
less reliable than they had ever believed possible, perhaps they should
consider that this may have also been true in the past, including on
important matters that they had never previously investigated.

The American Pravda Series

Essays in a Historical Counter-Narrative of the Last One Hundred
Years
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • 500,000 Words
Donald Trump, Eugene Debs, and AMLO
The American Political System as Laughingstock or Trainwreck

The Unz Review • August 7, 2023 • 4,900 Words

I’m not sure whether Donald Trump has ever heard of Eugene Debs, the
austerely incorruptible early leader of America’s Socialist Party. But I think
there’s a growing likelihood that their two names will soon be paired in
many news stories as we move towards the 2024 election.

Although almost forgotten today, Debs was a very prominent political figure
a century ago, and he usually received brief mention in my introductory
history textbooks, which occasionally noted the five times he had run for the
Presidency on the Socialist Party ticket. His high-water mark came in the
1912 election when he pulled a remarkable 6% of the national vote, possibly
even influencing the outcome of the bitter three-way race between
incumbent President Howard Taft, former President Theodore Roosevelt,
and New Jersey Gov. Woodrow Wilson, which was won by the latter.
Historian James Chace, former managing editor of Foreign Affairs, told that
story in an interesting 2004 book.
The horrific First World War broke out the year after Wilson was
inaugurated, and Debs, a strong anti-militarist, sat out the 1916 race, when
Wilson won a very narrow reelection victory partly on the strength of the
campaign slogan “He kept us out of war.” But America’s industrial giants
had sold enormous quantities of munitions to the Allies, much of it on credit,
and without an Allied victory, those loans could never be repaid. So once
the votes were counted and after a failed attempt to negotiate peace,
Wilson soon reversed himself and took America into the stalemated
European conflict.

Armies of many millions had already spent several years clashing on the
Western Front, and only an enormous American force could tip the
balance, so Wilson enacted a military draft, the first and only such measure
in our national history except for the Civil War fought more than two
generations earlier. Forcing millions of Americans to fight and die
thousands of miles from home in a foreign war proved extremely unpopular
in many parts of the country, and harsh sedition laws were soon passed,
threatening long prison sentences for anyone who challenged those
controversial government policies.

At a 1918 political rally, Debs made some disparaging remarks about his
government’s actions and the military draft, and he was quickly prosecuted
and convicted despite his free speech defense, receiving a ten-year sentence
in federal prison. That exemplary punishment hardly deterred him or his
committed supporters, so the Socialist Party nominated him as its candidate
in the 1920 Presidential race. Despite campaigning from his prison cell, he
still won nearly a million votes—3.4% of the total. That achievement
probably became the most memorable incident of his long career, and was
almost always worth a sentence in history textbooks written many decades
later.

That bizarre story of a candidate running for the Presidency while serving
time in federal prison has surely brought a smile to the faces of generations
of high school and college students, an amusing historical tidbit that
leavened the otherwise dull profusion of obscure names and dates from a
century ago. But today the sheer political insanity of America’s Democratic
Party establishment has now brought our unfortunate country to a far
stranger situation. Depending upon the speed of the judicial process, we
face the very real prospect of former President Donald J. Trump running—
and winning—the Presidency while sitting on his cot in state or federal
prison.

Media is the oxygen of political campaigns, and Trump’s totally unexpected

primary and general election victories in 2016 were driven by the massive
attention he received for his sometimes outrageous public statements,
coverage greatly amplified by the unprecedented number of Twitter
followers he had quickly amassed on social media. His bitter political
enemies recognized the enormous, unfiltered power of that latter
communication tool, and after he reached the White House, they exerted
enormous pressure upon Twitter to begin censoring him. The notion of an
American tech company restricting the political speech of a sitting American
President seemed like something out of a Monty Python sketch, but it
actually happened. Meanwhile, many of his leading activist supporters and
pundit allies were completely purged from that platform, blows that
greatly hindered his reelection campaign. Then after his November defeat
and Joseph Biden’s inauguration, Trump himself suffered the same fate,
with his Twitter account permanently suspended.

With Trump banned from Twitter in early 2021, his political standing soon
ebbed away as more and more of his low-information political base
gradually forgot about him. This led many observers to conclude that his
time had passed and some rival would likely capture the Republican
nomination in the 2024 primaries.

However, that decline was quickly reversed when Trump’s bitterly self-
destructive Democratic Party enemies launched a series of prosecutions
against him on a variety of different charges, ranging from mishandling
secret documents to paying hush money to a former girlfriend to election
fraud, all rather dubious charges. With such exciting new topics, the endless
Trump Political Reality show had suddenly returned as popular
entertainment, regaining the very high ratings it had previously enjoyed.
Trump once again became the great hero of his populist Republican
supporters, with recent polls showing he was drawing far more support in
the 2024 primaries than all his Republican rivals combined.
Indeed, some cynical observers even suggested that this outcome might have
been intentional. Perhaps the Democrats regarded Trump as the weakest
Republican candidate they might face in 2024, and sought to ensure his
renomination. Such a deeply Machiavellian strategy might be possible, but
all of these various prosecutions and trials will surely keep Trump at the top
of the news cycle from now until November 2024, whether Election Day
finds him still on trial or already serving time behind bars. It’s easy to
imagine that the same tidal wave of backlash sentiment now propelling
Trump to a landslide victory in the forthcoming primaries might also carry
over into November, returning him to the Presidency, whether from the
courtroom or the jail house.

We should consider that even a couple of months ago when Trump’s legal
problems were only just beginning, he already began attracting strongly
sympathetic remarks from unexpected ideological quarters.
Columnist Kevin Barrett is a Muslim convert friendly towards Iran, and in
May he published a short item that opened by characterizing Trump as “an
odious figure…A narcissistic semi-literate scoundrel.” But his piece was
entitled “Why I’m ALMOST Ready to Vote for Trump,” and he
explained that the totally unhinged campaign of vilification by our entire
political and media establishment against the obnoxious former President
had largely shifted him in that direction. He also cited the analysis of a
popular progressive podcaster:

Jimmy Dore makes a good case that Trump’s civil trial for sexual
assault and defamation was “A Pure Democratic Hit Job.” Dore
points out that New York’s bizarre one-year repeal of the statute of
limitations was specifically designed to grease the skids for Carroll-v-
Trump. Since when did governments start temporarily repealing statutes
of limitations so they can go after political figures they don’t like? The
move seems especially egregious because it involved an almost three-
decade-old case in which the alleged victim can’t even remember which
year the alleged assault happened, and has no evidence whatsoever
other than her word against his. If you’re going to do something as
extreme as suspending the statute of limitations so you can prosecute a
specific case, shouldn’t you at least have some evidence?

Around the same time, other influential progressive journalists such as Max
Blumenthal and Aaron Mate similarly ridiculed Trump’s indictment on hush-
money charges by an NYC prosecutor.
As of a week ago, Trump had already been facing 71 separate state and
federal felony indictments. Then he was struck by the weightiest federal
charge of all, accusing him of organizing a conspiracy to overturn the 2020
election results. These days American society is deeply polarized and most
of the charges against Trump will be tried in venues such as DC, Manhattan,
and Atlanta where the jury-pools are sure to be heavily larded with Trump-
haters. Add to that the uniformly hostile media coverage, and Trump’s
prospects of acquittal seem as dim as those faced by Debs in the wartime
atmosphere of 1918. With so many dozens of serious charges against him,
our 45th President seems likely to end up behind bars.

These latest indictments finally moved longtime progressive columnist and

cartoonist Ted Rall into that same camp of outright Trump sympathizers. On
Friday he published a column entitled “Hail to the Jailbird
President,” arguing that Trump might very well regain the Presidency on
the strength of the unrelenting judicial and media campaign against him.
According to Rall, the legal and political establishment fails to understand
“that we, the people, hate their guts much more than we look down on…
someone like Trump.”
Although Trump’s legion of enemies in the political and media firmament
would probably regard Rall’s reaction as incomprehensible, the point he is
making is a very simple one. In recent years, enormous numbers of
Americans, possibly even a considerable majority, have come to regard our
country’s ruling elite establishment as their deepest, sworn enemy. The
massive vilification of Trump in such quarters indicates that those elites fear
Trump as their most dangerous foe, so many voters may eventually conclude
that the enemy of their enemy is at least worth a casual vote on the
November ballot.

Although Trump’s previous legal troubles had received a great deal of media
attention, the coverage of the latest charges—that he had illegally conspired
to subvert American democracy by challenging the results of the 2020
election and remaining in office—was vastly greater.

Only a fraction of New York Times subscribers still receive the national print
edition, but it usefully provides a congealed record of those issues most
important to the editors, and on both Thursday and Friday the upper section
of each front page—nearly two-thirds of the available space—was filled
with multiple stories describing Trump’s federal indictment on election
conspiracy charges.

I only very lightly skimmed the arguments and they’re mostly a jumble in
my mind, but apparently the blowhard Trump felt he’d actually won the
2020 election and spoke with his leading supporters about challenging the
official results, which they all believed were heavily tainted with fraud. But
although countless American candidates throughout our history have bitterly
complained about stolen elections and sometimes contested the outcomes,
our rabidly partisan Democratic prosecutors have now decided to treat that
behavior as a crime, apparently hoping to destroy their Trumpian nemesis
using the power of the courts.

This judicial innovation may be unique in the developed world and seems
extremely rare even outside it. Trump’s crude insults about “Mexican
rapists” had hardly endeared him to the citizens of our Southern neighbor,
but by all accounts Mexico’s leftist President Andrés Manuel López Obrador
—AMLO—seemed quite supportive and sympathetic towards Trump
during his reelection campaign, and was also one of the last major world
leaders to accept Biden’s victory and acknowledge that Trump had lost.

López Obrador being proclaimed “Legitimate President of Mexico”

by his supporters in November 2006

Probably one of the factors behind this surprising political twist was that the
populist AMLO had himself been bitterly opposed by the united political
establishment of his own country when he’d run for the presidency in 2006
and 2012, and twice claimed that he had been cheated of victory by
government fraud. His extremely narrow loss in 2006 had been
particularly suspicious, and after his apparent election-night victory had
suddenly been transmuted into defeat, he and his outraged supporters began
a massive protest campaign that disrupted life in the capital city, with
his sympathizers even publicly swearing him in as “the Legitimate
President of Mexico.”

Yet while many Americans—Trumpists most of all—regularly disparage and

insult Mexico as a Third World “shithole country,” the Mexican political
elites tolerated AMLO’s protests with good grace. Rather than being
prosecuted and imprisoned, AMLO eventually gave up on his unofficial
presidency and after creating a new party as his vehicle, ran for president a
third time in 2018, winning in a huge landslide despite any election
fraud. So while Trump faces time in prison for complaining about a stolen
election, his Mexican counterpart who had earlier done much the same thing
is completing his very successful six-year term, ranked as one of the world’s
most popular leaders and having a good chance that his hand-picked
candidate will succeed him.

Fortunately for AMLO, his protests of a stolen election had occurred in

2006, long before Trump entered the scene, so any attempt by his own
government to prosecute and imprison him would have surely been
denounced and ridiculed by the American establishment as an outrageous
violation of basic democratic principles. But these days, the globally-
dominant and Trump-hating American media plays a very different tune, so
the precedent of prosecuting a losing candidate for protesting alleged
election fraud may soon spread worldwide.

In Brazil, the conservative establishment had used a somewhat doubtful

corruption conviction to block former President Lula from seeking to
regain the presidency, but once it was overturned by the courts, he
successfully did so, and his own courts then used the excuse of election
protests to prohibit his defeated rightwing opponent President Bolsonaro
from trying to do the same in four years time.

In India, the ultra-rightwing Modi government is overwhelmingly popular,

but still decided to take no chances. The parliamentary opposition is led by
Rahul Gandhi, the son, grandson, and great-grandson of past Prime
Ministers, but the government prosecuted him for making a public statement
seeming to imply that Modi was crooked, successfully banning him from
politics as a consequence, though on Friday a court overturned the
verdict. But just a day later, former Prime Minister Imran Khan of
neighboring Pakistan was sent to prison for three years, thereby
preventing him from contesting the forthcoming elections; the massive
public protests Khan had led against his sudden removal from office last
year had deeply outraged the country’s powerful military.

I fear that all too many democratic or semi-democratic governments around

the world will now eagerly seize upon the innovative electoral strategy
pioneered by our own Democratic Party and henceforth use judicial means
to eliminate their political rivals.

Moreover, while the ferociously anti-Trumpist media would never admit the
possibility, the Donald and his angry supporters actually have a very strong
case in their bitter complaints of a stolen 2020 election. I explained those
simple facts back in January 2021.
Although hardly suggested by our mainstream media, the officially-
reported results demonstrated that our 2020 presidential election was
extraordinarily close.

All the regular pre-election polls had shown the Democratic candidate
with a comfortable lead, but just as had been the case four years earlier,
the actual votes tabulated revealed an entirely contrary outcome.
According to the official vote-count, the Biden/Harris ticket ended up
millions of votes ahead, having racked up huge leads in
overwhelmingly Democratic states such as my own California, and also
won by a very comfortable 306 to 232 margin in Electoral Votes. But
control of the White House depends upon the state-by-state tallies, and
these told a very different story.

Incumbent Donald Trump lost Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin by

such extremely narrow margins that a swing of less than 22,000 votes
in those crucial states would have gotten him reelected. With a record
158 million votes cast, this amounted to a victory margin of around
0.01%. So if just one American voter in 7,000 had changed his mind,
Trump might have received another four years in office. One American
voter in 7,000.

Such an exceptionally narrow victory is extremely unusual in modern

American history. For decades, the very tight Kennedy-Nixon race of
1960 had been a byword for close results, but Biden’s margin of victory
was much smaller. More recently, George W. Bush won a narrow
reelection over Sen. John F. Kerry in 2004, but Kerry would have
required a voter swing nearly five times greater than Trump’s in order
to claim victory. Indeed, with the sole exception of the notorious
“dangling chads” Florida decision of the 2000 Bush-Gore election, no
American presidential candidate in over 100 years had lost by so
narrow a voter margin as Donald J. Trump.

If our incompetent or dishonest media had correctly reported these

simple facts, perhaps Democratic partisans would have been somewhat
more understanding of the outrage expressed by so many of their
Republican counterparts, who believed they had been cheated of their
 election victory. Admittedly, Trump backers seem equally unaware of
the historically slender margin of their candidate’s defeat.

Furthermore, not only was the 2020 Presidential election remarkably close,
but any objective examination of the facts clearly proves that outcome was
stolen from Trump. This easily explains the widespread protests by his
supporters in DC on January 6th, as I discussed a few days later.

I haven’t investigated the matter, but there does seem to be considerable

circumstantial evidence of widespread ballot fraud by Democratic Party
forces, hardly surprising given the apocalyptic manner in which so
many of their leaders had characterized the threat of a Trump
reelection. After all, if they sincerely believed that a Trump victory
would be catastrophic for America why would they not use every
possible means, fair and foul alike, to save our country from that dire
fate?

In particular, several of the major swing-states contain large cities—

Detroit, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, and Atlanta—that are both totally
controlled by the Democratic Party and also notoriously corrupt, and
various eye-witnesses have suggested that the huge anti-Trump margins
they provided may have been heavily “padded” to ensure the
candidate’s defeat.

Even leaving aside some of these plausible claims, the case for a stolen
election seems almost airtight. I don’t know or care anything about
Dominion voting machines, whether they are controlled by Venezuelan
Marxists, Chinese Communists, or Martians. But the most blatant
election-theft was accomplished in absolutely plain sight.

Not long before the election, the hard drive of an abandoned laptop
owned by Joe Biden’s son Hunter revealed a gigantic international
corruption scheme, quite possibility involving the candidate himself.
But the facts of this enormous political scandal were entirely ignored
and boycotted by virtually every mainstream media outlet. And once
the story was finally published in the pages of the New York Post,
America’s oldest newspaper, all links to the Post article and its website
were suddenly banned by Twitter, Facebook, and other social media
outlets to ensure that the voters remained ignorant until after they had
cast their ballots.

Renowned international journalist Glenn Greenwald was hardly a

Trump partisan, but he became outraged that the editors of
the Intercept, the \$100 million publication he himself had co-founded,
refused to allow him to cover that massive media scandal, and he
angrily resigned in protest. In effect, America’s media and tech giants
formed a united front to steal the election and somehow drag the
crippled Biden/Harris ticket across the finish line.

The Hunter Biden corruption scandal seemed about as serious as any in

modern presidential election history and Biden’s official victory margin
was just 0.01%. So if the American voters had been allowed to learn the
truth, Trump almost certainly would have won the election, quite
possibly in an Electoral College landslide. Given these facts, anyone
who continues to deny that the election was stolen from Trump is
simply being ridiculous.

Heated election campaigns have consequences, and this is especially

true when all of America’s most powerful corporations and ruling elites
unite to essentially steal a reelection from a populist incumbent, hero-
worshiped by many tens of millions of Americans. And when despite
all that blatant unfairness and theft, the final margin of defeat is just one
vote in 7,000, an explosion of popular outrage should only be expected.

Solid estimates appear unavailable, but it seems that hundreds of

thousands of grass-roots Trump supporters traveled to our nation’s
capital to protest against what they regarded as a stolen election, and
then peacefully assembled to listen to their hero’s speech.
Afterwards, a tiny sliver of this vast multitude of angry individuals—
perhaps less than one in a thousand—barged their way into the
strangely-undefended Capitol building of Congress, took souvenir
selfies, livesteamed their antics, and generally played the role
of tourist-protesters while the lawmakers they so despised as corrupt
mostly fled or hid. These Trumpists and some of their colorful
costumes brought to mind the radical Yippies of the late 1960s.
The previous year had seen an unprecedented wave of violent riots,
arson, and looting across some 200 American cities, which our entirely
corrupt and dishonest media had generally characterized as “mostly
peaceful protests.” In previous years, angry mobs of organized
Democratic activists had repeatedly invaded and occupied the
Wisconsin Legislature, sometimes winning praise from the media. But
when unarmed Trump supporters now did something similar for a few
hours in Washington, they were quickly branded “domestic terrorists”
seeking to overthrow our democracy.

A video shows Ashli Babbitt, an unarmed female protester, being shot

dead by a security guard as she tried to climb through a window, an
incident not dissimilar to the famous Kent State shootings of a 1960s
campus protest, but hardly treated by the media in a similar manner.
 American Pravda: Our Disputed Election
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • January 14, 2021 • 2,000 Words

The total tech and media suppression of the contents of the Hunter Biden
laptop probably cost Trump an easy or even overwhelming reelection
victory. Highly-regarded former longtime CIA Analyst Ray McGovern,
certainly no Trump supporter, noted that it has now come out that current
Secretary of State Antony Blinken—then a top Biden aide—had helped
orchestrate the public declaration by 51 former Intelligence officers that the
contents of the Hunter Biden laptop should be disregarded as likely “Russian
disinformation.”

Others have come to similar conclusions regarding the media cover-up of

massive Biden corruption. Jonathan Turley, a leading establishmentarian
figure holds the Shapiro Chair of Public Interest Law at George Washington
University. As his 5,000 word Wikipedia entry describes, he has spent
decades as one of our most prolific and influential media commentators on
legal matters, publishing numerous pieces in the New York Times and the
Washington Post while being a regular guest on our broadcast networks.

The Hill is one of DC’s leading political newspapers and a couple of months
ago, Turley published an outraged column, expressing his amazement at
the total unwillingness of our media to report the plain facts of the evidence
of massive financial corruption engulfing the Biden family.

This week, Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) tried to do the impossible.

After he and his colleagues presented a labyrinth of LLC shell
companies and accounts used to funnel as much as \$10 million to
Biden family members, Donalds tried to induce the press to show some
interest in the massive corruption scandal. “For those in the press, this
easy pickings & Pulitzer-level stuff right here,” he pleaded.

The response was virtually immediate. Despite showing nine Biden

family members allegedly receiving funds from corrupt figures in
Romania, China and other countries, The New Republic quickly ran a
story headlined “Republicans Finally Admit They Have No
Incriminating Evidence on Joe Biden.”

For many of us, it was otherworldly. A decade ago, when then-Vice

President Joe Biden was denouncing corruption in Romania and
Ukraine and promising action by the United States, massive payments
were flowing to his son Hunter Biden and a variety of family members,
including Biden grandchildren.

The brilliance of the Biden team was that it invested the media in this
scandal at the outset by burying the laptop story as “Russian
disinformation” before the election. That was, of course, false, but it
took two years for most major media outlets to admit that the laptop
was authentic.

But the media then ignored what was on that “authentic laptop.”
Hundreds of emails detailed potentially criminal conduct and raw
influence peddling in foreign countries.

When media outlets such as the New York Post confirmed the emails,
the media then insisted that there was no corroboration of the influence
peddling payments and no clear proof of criminal conduct. It entirely
ignored the obvious corruption itself.

Now that the House has released corroboration in actual money

transfers linking many in the Biden family, the media is insisting that
this is no scandal because there is no direct proof of payments to Joe
Biden.

Putting aside that this is only the fourth month of an investigation, the
media’s demand of a direct payment to President Biden is laughably
 absurd. The payments were going to his family, but he was the object of
the influence peddling.

The House has shown millions of dollars going to at least nine

Bidens like dividends from a family business. As a long-time critic of
influence peddling among both Republicans and Democrats, I have
never seen the equal of the Bidens.

The whole purpose of influence peddling is to use family members as

shields for corrupt officials. Instead of making a direct payment to a
politician, which could be seen as a bribe, you can give millions to his
or her spouse or children.

Moreover, these emails include references to Joe Biden getting a 10

percent cut of one Chinese deal. It also shows Biden associates warning
not to use Joe Biden’s name but to employ code names like “the Big
Guy.” At the same time, the president and the first lady are referenced
as benefiting from offices and receiving payments from Hunter.

Indeed, Hunter complains that his father is taking half of everything

that he is raking in.

American Pravda: The Limits of Media Corruption

Ron Unz • The Unz Review • May 22, 2023 • 3,400 Words

The leftist Moon of Alabama blogger recently emphasized that there seems
to be a striking correspondence between the timing of emerging revelations
of the Biden corruption scandal and the criminal indictments made against
Trump.
After considering the latest public disclosures regarding Biden family
business activities, Kim Dotcom suggested that we may have only seen the
tip of the corruption iceberg, and his analysis was viewed more than 600,000
times.
As Adam Smith once observed, “There is a great deal of ruin in a nation,”
but our own country may be rapidly approaching its limit. Nearly 70% of
Republicans believe that Donald Trump actually won the 2020 election and
only voting fraud put Joseph Biden in the White House, but Trump now
faces a lengthy prison sentence for taking that same position.

As a recent New York Times article emphasized, the notion of a jailed

former President running for the White House is an absolutely extraordinary
event and our country would be entering “uncharted territory.” But there is
also a very real possibility that Trump would win and none of the legal
experts consulted by the Times had any idea of what that would entail: “No
one knows.”

America’s political system is facing an enormous crisis of legitimacy,

perhaps just as serious and potentially fatal as the one that brought down the
old USSR in the early 1990s. Our horrendous budget and trade deficits seem
permanent but clearly unsustainable, we recently suffered the highest
inflation in four decades, and three years ago we experienced the worst
urban rioting since the 1960s, as well as the largest spike in the national
homicide rate since record-keeping began. We have spent the last eighteen
months fighting a losing proxy-war against nuclear-armed Russia on
Russia’s own border, astonishingly reckless behavior that would have been
unimaginable at the height of the old Cold War. The Covid epidemic took
more than a million American lives and last year I argued that the calamity
was closely analogous to the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster that played
such a major role in the collapse of the Soviet Union a few years later.

A Thousand Times Greater Than the Chernobyl Nuclear Disaster

Ron Unz • The Unz Review • July 11, 2022 • 2,300 Words

As a longstanding political regime loses legitimacy, more and more

individuals begin to question the fundamental narrative that it had promoted,
wondering which of those beliefs are merely falsehoods endlessly repeated
by a dishonest media. Over the last five years, my own American Pravda
series has heavily explored these sorts of issues, and last week I discussed
these topics with Michael Rectenwald, a former NYU professor.
As of today, there is a serious possibility that Donald Trump will win the
Presidency while campaigning from a prison cell. That astonishing prospect
perfectly symbolizes the current state of the American political system.
The Attempted Assassination of Donald
Trump
The Unz Review • July 17, 2024 • 2,000 Words

Over the last couple of days the news cycle has been overwhelmingly
dominated by a sniper’s attempted assassination of Donald Trump at a large
campaign rally in western Pennsylvania, with the presidential candidate
fortunate enough to escape with only a minor wound to his ear.

The photo of the former president holding his arm high even while streaks
of blood trickled down his face has become an iconic global image
somewhat recalling the historic scene of six U.S. marines raising the
American flag on Iwo Jima, and it fully solidified his front-runner status.
Within a day or two, billionaire hedge-fund manager Bill Ackman
endorsed Trump as did industrialist Elon Musk, the wealthiest man in
the world, with the latter promising to contribute a mammoth \$45
million per month to a pro-Trump political committee.

Meanwhile, the ongoing efforts of various influential Democrats to pressure

President Joseph Biden into dropping out of the race on grounds of mental
incapacity completely vanished from the news, swamped by the dramatic
account of Trump’s narrow escape from death. With the media no longer
focusing on Biden’s problems, the chances that the DNC might be able to
replace him with a stronger candidate may have been lost, further
increasing Trump’s odds of regaining the White House this November.

I’ve only casually followed the story of this attempted assassination without
spending much time investigating the details of the incident or the
considerable number of conflicting theories floating around on the Internet.
But various people have asked me for my opinion, so I might as well
provide it, though my views should not be accorded any more weight than
they deserve, especially since I lack any military expertise.
According to the media accounts, a young 20-year-old gunman named
Thomas Matthew Crooks was somehow able to enter the vicinity of the
Trump rally armed with an AR-15 rifle. He set himself up on the rooftop of
a nearby building and fired several shots, one of which wounded Trump in
the ear while another killed a bystander in the crowd, after which he himself
was shot dead by counter-sniper fire from security personnel.

Allowing an armed gunman such an opportunity to potentially kill a leading

presidential candidate obviously involved extremely serious lapses in
security by the Secret Service agents guarding Trump and this has naturally
provoked widespread suspicions that some sort of plot had been
responsible. There have also been claims circulating on social media that
bystanders noticed the gunman and alerted authorities, but instead of
ordering the sniper shot or at least securing the candidate and taking him to
safety, the security personnel waited until the prospective assassin had fired
his potentially fatal shots before taking any action.

At the very least this is obviously a huge black-eye for our Secret Service
and the other police agencies that were on the scene, supposedly protecting
Trump.

Given the extremely strong emotions that Trump arouses in both his
supporters and his opponents, it’s hardly surprising that this very strange
and suspicious official story quickly inspired numerous conspiratorial
narratives, which have widely circulated among both Trump-backers and
Trump-haters.

For more than eight years, most American elites have expressed a seething
hatred of Trump, doing everything they could to frustrate his presidency,
ensure his defeat in 2020, and then prevent him from regaining the White
House in 2024. Soon after a mob of outraged Trumpists stormed the DC
Capitol on January 7, 2021, I published an article pointing to the
overwhelming evidence that the American media and our Internet giants,
assisted by numerous dishonest former intelligence officers, had combined
to steal the 2020 election from Donald Trump:
 American Pravda: Our Disputed Election
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • January 14, 2021 • 2,000 Words

Last year I discussed the extraordinary efforts of those same biased media
outlets to hide the massive corruption scandal engulfing Joseph Biden and
his family, doing so both prior to the 2020 vote and now leading up to the
2024 election.

American Pravda: The Limits of Media Corruption

Ron Unz • The Unz Review • May 22, 2023 • 3,400 Words

More recently as Trump’s efforts to regain the presidency moved forward,

his bitter Democratic enemies launched a series of outrageous political
prosecutions hoping that felony convictions and possible imprisonment
would destroy Trump’s popularity with voters. But instead Trump’s polling
numbers continued to rise, and his Republican renomination became
assured.

American Pravda: Donald Trump, Eugene Debs, and AMLO

The American Political System as Laughingstock or Trainwreck
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • August 7, 2023 • 4,900 Words

Having failed at every step to block Trump’s rise, his political enemies were
left with few available options. Their dilemma eventually led Tucker
Carlson to publicly speculate that they would finally conclude that
orchestrating Trump’s assassination was their best chance of
preventing his triumphant return to the White House.

So now with Trump leading in the polls and the desperate Democrats
fearful that Biden would be no match for him in November, a sniper was
allowed surprisingly easy access to the candidate at a rally, and if the
trajectory of the bullet he fired had been an inch or two different, Trump
could easily have been killed. Under these circumstances, only the most
oblivious would fail to be highly suspicious of what happened.
Did Trump’s bitter enemies conspire to have him killed by an assassin’s
bullet, as had happened more than half-century ago to President John F.
Kennedy and his younger brother Robert? While that is certainly possible,
unless much stronger evidence emerges, I will remain extremely skeptical.

Assassinating a former president who is leading in the current polls is a

very serious undertaking, and Trump’s lucky survival has drastically
strengthened the support he enjoys both from the voters and from the
billionaire donor class while his security will also surely be massively
increased. I think it quite unlikely that any future sniper will have as easy a
time gaining access to him at a rally or anywhere else. As Emerson said,
“When you strike at a king, you must kill him.”

So if Trump’s enemies had decided to have him killed, I doubt they would
have selected an untrained 20-year-old nursing home worker as their
assassin, a choice that resulted in the failure that occurred. Surely a far more
professional sniper would have been employed, a sniper who never would
have missed his target. Arranging for the Secret Service agents and the local
police to stand down and provide an opening entailed enormous political
risks, and what good would that do if the gunman selected couldn’t shoot
straight? If any powerful organization or individual had been behind the
assassination plot, Trump would be dead and Americans would be arguing
about a successful rather than a botched assassination.

The dozens of security personnel who left Trump vulnerable are now being
denounced as grossly negligent in the media, and if any of them had been
given suspicious orders responsible for that debacle, they will surely soon
come forward and defend themselves by explaining what had happened and
implicating those responsible. If none of them do so, then the likelihood of
any anti-Trump plot begins to dissipate, and the explanation of sheer
incompetence becomes the most plausible theory.

One claim I’ve seen is that the gunman was wearing some sort of military-
themed shirt and casually carrying his rifle in plain sight, leading most
onlookers to assume that he was a member of one of the various different
organizations tasked with ensuring Trump’s safety. This seems like exactly
the sort of stupid bureaucratic mistake that can easily occur when multiple
government agencies are involved in a common project.
Meanwhile, some anti-Trump circles have naturally promoted their own
contrary conspiracy theories. They have suggested that the attack was a
daring false-flag operation organized by Trump or his close allies, intended
to only slightly wound the candidate and thereby greatly bolster his political
campaign, just as has now happened.

However, I think this scenario is even less plausible than the other one.
Once again, we must realize that the shooter selected for this dangerously
lethal operation was an untrained 20-year-old firing from a distance of 400
feet, a sniper who hit Trump’s ear rather than his head. Thus, any such plan
to boost Trump could very easily have ended up killing him instead, and it’s
difficult to believe that any rational Trump supporter would have taken such
a gigantic risk.

Perhaps some of these conspiracy advocates believe that the wound itself
was somehow faked, and that all the Secret Service agents who saw the
injury at close range and hustled Trump away were conspirators in the plot.
But lacking any evidence, these sorts of theories grow ever more complex
and unlikely.

My own reconstruction of what happened is different and much simpler.

When I first heard that Trump had survived an attempted assassination, my

surprise was not that it had occurred but that there hadn’t already been a
dozen or more previous attacks. I doubt that any political figure in modern
American history has ever been so massively demonized by our mainstream
media as Donald J. Trump during the last eight or nine years. He’s been
vilified as a fascist, a Hitler, a traitor, a Russian stooge, a rapist, a racist, a
swindler. Trump was endlessly portrayed as a fiend absolutely determined
to destroy American freedom and democracy, someone who represented our
country’s deadliest human enemy.

Our media creates our reality and for most of the last decade, hundreds of
millions of Americans have been completely blanketed by these unrelenting
waves of ferocious anti-Trump propaganda, so surely many thousands of
them would have been unbalanced enough to consider saving our country
by taking the law into their own hands and patriotically risking their own
lives to eliminate that deadly human menace. The media had spent all these
years painting a very bright target on Trump’s back, and I’ve been
astonished that until a couple of days ago no American had yet taken aim at
it.

Consider an analogous case from a few years ago. For many years, anti-
immigration activists loudly proclaimed that our country was being
“invaded” by hordes of hostile Mexican immigrants. Therefore, I was
hardly too surprised that in 2019 a very patriotic but somewhat dim-witted
21-year-old named Patrick Wood Crusius took that heated political rhetoric
a little too literally and decided to shoot as many of those foreign invaders
as he could, killing a couple of dozen Hispanics at a Walmart store in El
Paso, Texas. I strongly suspect that the young gunman who tried to kill
Trump acted out of roughly similar motives.

Finally, I was generally pleased to see that Trump named Sen. J.D. Vance
as his running mate. Although I’m not exactly thrilled with many of
Vance’s positions, notably his extremely aggressive rhetoric regarding Iran
and the Middle East, he seemed like the least bad choice among the several
names under consideration, and we have to settle for what we can get.

Back in January 2013, Prof. Amy Chua and others had invited me to the
Yale Law School to give a talk on my Meritocracy analysis of elite
university admissions, and Vance, then using his previous name of Hamel,
had been the young law school student who met me when I arrived and
guided me around. Now, less than a dozen years later, he’s certainly come
up a great deal in the world, being on the verge of becoming one of the
youngest vice presidents in our national history, someone just a heartbeat
away from sitting in the Oval Office. It’s very nice to know that he’s fully
aware of some of the highly-controversial matters of great importance to
our national future.

Challenging Racial Discrimination at Harvard

Ron Unz • The Unz Review • October 31, 2022 • 5,800 Words